Buried amid the surprise stimulus by the Bank of Japan last week was a footnote: the central bank will start using an equity gauge designed to shame the nation’s companies into becoming more profitable

Bank of Japan officials see buying exchange-traded funds based on the JPX-Nikkei Index 400 as a future option to boost the impact of unprecedented easing and encourage companies to deploy cash for investment, according to people familiar with the central bank’s discussions

The Bank of Japan’s massive purchases of government debt hit a milestone this week, sucking liquidity out of the market to such an extent that the benchmark 10-year bond went untraded for more than a day, the first time in 13 years

The Nikkei, Japan’s primary exchange, rose 52% last year, but has fallen more than 8% in 2014, vastly underperforming most of its global exchange peers, including the S&P/TSX Composite, which is up about 5% so far

The U.S. Federal Reserve likely won't reduce its bond-buying program this week, but if it does investors with a global perspective can still take some solace in Japan’s extraordinary quantitative-easing measures that are providing plenty of stimulus in their own right to select markets